I meant to get this out by Monday, but the hurricane sort of put a damper on that… Here it is now, though.

I am proud to announce the first alpha release for Muon Suite 2.0. The Muon Suite is a set of package management utilities for Debian-based Linux distributions built on KDE technologies. Packages for Kubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” are available in the QApt Experimental PPA.

2.0? A rewrite?

Nope! I had to make changes to LibQApt that would prevent programs compiled against LibQApt 1.x from being able to run or compile against LibQApt 2.x. Muon Suite 2.0 simply means that it uses LibQApt 2.0. (In developer speak, this release breaks both ABI and API. It’s mostly source-compatible, but will require a few changes/additions in programs using LibQApt) I’ll write a separate post about LibQApt2 explaining the changes in detail. Most of my efforts this cycle have been towards LibQApt2, but this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing new on the Muon front. 😉

KNewStuff3 support

Both the Muon Software Center and Muon Discover now support installing things via KDE’s KNewStuff framework version 3. This is the framework that allows developers to publish scripted plugins such as Plasma widgets to the world. Currently the Muon Software Center and Muon Discover have categories for Plasma widgets (as well as plugins for the Comics plasmoid) utilizing KNS3. Suggestions for further categories using KNS3 are welcome.

Aleix wrote about this feature in detail at his blog. As he wrote, the work in supporting multiple resource types opens up the possibility of new backends. (Perhaps a backend that grabs data from AppStream in the future) Exciting stuff.

Changelogs

Detailed changelogs for LibQApt and Muon can be found here and here, respectively.